Premise Data confirms secret military and intelligence contracts in court filing
Premise Data confirms secret military and intelligence contracts in court filing
Polling firm Premise Data disclosed existence of its covert work with military and intelligence agencies in a court filing from Monday -- but requested protection against any further disclosures.
More than four years into its lawsuit against former employee Alex Pompe, the gig-work data collection platform Premise Data has requested that the Santa Clara County Superior Court protect the company against any dislosures of its secretive military and intelligence contracts. The request came from Maury Blackman, who took over as CEO of Premise in February 2018 — seven months before Pompe left the company to become a research manager in Facebook’s Data for Good program and fourteen months before the company sued Pompe for allegedly disclosing sensitive trade secrets.
At the center of the April 19, 2019 complaint against Pompe is an allegation that he “interfered” with Premise’s international data collection contract with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation by alerting them in March 2019 to Premise’s covert work with U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Said relationships received prominent press coverage two years later in a Wall Street Journal exposé which published a copy of Premise’s pitch to U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan on how the company’s platform was used to covertly support U.S. Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) collection, as well as Information Operations (IO).
Despite the high-profile leak of Premise’s clandestine surveillance activities, influential outlets such as The Economist have unskeptically promoted Premise as a neutral polling platform for delicate topics such as Western African support for the ousting of Niger president Mohamed Bazoum in July.
The recent declaration from Premise CEO Maury Blackman — which took place on August 24th but was electronically filed four days later — opens with the direct admission that “Premise has clients in the military and intelligence sectors, which represent a portion of its overall client base.” Blackman further notes that he holds a “security clearance with the United States Department of Defense” and that disclosure of Premise’s military and intelligence clients — “a closely-guarded trade secret” — “would cause Premise incalculable business harm” because Premise believes said contracts to be conditioned on their clandestine nature.
Past advisors to Premise have included former USAID Administrator Rajiv J. Shah — who is currently the President of Rockefeller Foundation. And board members have included former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers and the founder of venture capital firm Social+Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya. (Current U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken disclosed investing at least $250,001 into Social+Capital before becoming part of the Biden administration.)
As part of his declaration, Blackman warned that public disclosure of Premise’s military and intelligence work could put workers on its platform at risk, “simply by virtue of having the Premise app on their phones”. Given that Premise’s role as a surveillance platform for U.S. military and intelligence agencies is now confirmed from multiple primary sources, it would seem that foreign governments have a right to be skeptical of the gig-work surveillance economies Premise is managing in their countries on behalf of the U.S. government.